Thursday, June 27, 2013

…Sean Michael is a favorite blogger, mooc-met and sharing an interest in citylit, representations of city spaces ~ real, imagined, visual, written ~ whom I do not visit often enough.

Today’s post is about travel, motion, and all that, and how learning and understanding emerge from both experience and structured thought. There are some quotes scattered throughout that relate to travel from writers who have articulated their thoughts on travel well.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. – Jack Kerouac

Before launching into this, I wanted to briefly say that travel is different for everyone, yet it holds such a grip on our collective imagination. It is everyone’s ‘dream’ even when it really isn’t. I know people that find travel to be more fatiguing than enriching, more hassle than its worth. As a society, we should be alright with this. It needn’t be everyone’s dream, but knowing the journey from the destination (and the importance of the former over the latter) should be an organizing philosophy for all.

…including #ABQ in 1915…perfect for a #City MOOC project on American cities, urban history, visual representations or historical images of the city…just plain fun to look at too. The G+ community does not seem to be doing much planning, just throwing down links, playing the dozens with URLs.

Britain's Daily Mailintroduces us to a fantastic digital archive of vintage city panoramas housed at the Library of Congress. About a quarter of the roughly four thousand images in the collection are devoted to cityscapes — incredibly wide sweeps of downtown areas trapped in time circa one hundred years ago. Good luck getting anything done this next hour

Monday, June 3, 2013

…#cityspace, something for the #citymooc, a supplement & companion piece or exemplum to Foucault's essay, Of Other Spaces (1967), one of many…spaces in Borges, Eco, Calvino. It illustrates Foucault's "oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space…"

The protests and occupations in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey began with but have now expanded far beyond the initial gathering in Taksim Gezi Park.

A Turkish colleague has been closely following these events and offers some useful links and insights:

In the second article, there are also useful links to find out about the kinds of demolishings, displacements, and dispossessions caused by the top-down urban transformation projects forcefully implemented since the mid-2000s.